14. Vijayanagara - The Last Emperors Of South India

Introduction to Vijayanagara

0:00In the year 1800, a Scottish captain by the name of Colin Mackenzie

0:32was traveling in the south of India.

0:37Mackenzie was an officer in the British East India Company, a trading corporation with a private army larger than many countries that in the last century had come to hold sway over vast areas of India.

0:53Mackenzie had come to India at the age of 30, and he became so fascinated with the place that he would never leave. He was a curious man and an avid collector of artifacts. Over his nearly 40 years in India, he amassed a collection of 1,500 historical manuscripts written on palm leaves in 13 languages, along with thousands of local histories and songs, charts, maps, sketches, and a collection of more than 6,000 coins.

1:29Mackenzie was also himself a skilled mapmaker, and he produced the first authentic geographical map of South India. And so, we can imagine his excitement as he was traveling through the rocky landscape of the Indian state of Karnataka, when his local guides told him of the existence of an enormous ruined city nearby that had once been the capital of a great and powerful empire. These ruins, they told him, were crumbling and overgrown,

2:02and could be found near the town of Anagundi, at a small village known as Hampi, a place that the Kannada-speaking locals had come to know by the name Al-Putun, or the ruined city.

Mackenzie's Visit

2:19Mackenzie urged them to take him there at once. Mackenzie's visit to the ruins is recorded in a journal he kept at the time, which has never been published, but which exists in rough manuscript form in the British Library. In his neat, curling, cursive handwriting, Mackenzie records what it was like to wander through the overgrown ruins of this great city, as his guides told him what they could about its history.

2:52South and half-southwest of Anagundi are still remaining many great ruins of the ancient city, palaces, pagodas, droogs, and fortifications, to which the people gave the name Al-Putun, or the ruined city. The palaces with the grand stables for elephants and horses are there to be seen. On the south-east of one palace is a place called Vasanta Vudum,

3:23formerly the Baths of the Rajas. They say that ancient kings used to entertain themselves on certain festivals with throwing saffron-tinged water on their women in a little square basin in the centre of the building, surrounded by galleries. Its drain or conduit, almost ruined, is to be still seen. Westward of this bathing place is a line of basins and cups cut out of the fine black stones and placed on each side of the water conduit.

3:54They say that here was formerly the king's garden.

4:01Here and there, families of monkeys would have clambered over these great boulders, chattering and chasing one another. Mackenzie climbed up onto the rocky granite hills nearby, and from there, he sketched the first comprehensive map of the site. He wasn't a man given over to poetry, and he let his maps and sketches do the talking. But he does make note of the sights that he saw as he explored the ruins. The interior ramparts,

4:36apparently designed to enclose the royal quarter, comprehending the palaces or mahals, waterworks of the most remarkable sort are visible, an eating place with a number of black stone slabs laid along a conduit, with dishes in the shape of leaves, sculptured on a theme, an octangular baton, gallery, and fountain in ruins, an elephant stable of 11 strong vaulted divisions,

5:06each crowned by a handsome cupola, an aqueduct on stone pillars, which brought water from the tank near Kamblapur to the royal quarter, gardens, fountains. It appears to have been destroyed with much industry. Only a few decades later, in the 1850s, another East India Company officer, one Colonel Alexander Greenlaw, would visit the ruined site with an early camera and would take some of the most affecting photographs

5:38of the ruins in their undisturbed condition. In them, we can see the same crumbling, magnificently carved edifices that Mackenzie would have, overgrown with mosses, growths of cactus-like euphorbia and grasses, their ornate couplers strangled by vines. We can see the beautiful bathing houses spilling over with water weeds, the halls of long-dead kings now silent and shaded beneath cracking roofs.

6:12In his journal, Mackenzie describes the site of the city now sunken beneath the earth.

6:21This place is now almost ruined, but its remains are still very magnificent and curious. The houses of the inhabitants are entirely destroyed, and the ruins now form high banks and eminences, under which are buried many great houses, whose terraces are level with or sunk below the soil. Many of these we can see in passing among the inner ruins. South of the king's palace is a square building, the top of which is destroyed now.

6:54This being covered with earth and overgrown with bushes, we could not penetrate its interior. These crumbling ruins were the remains of a city known as Vijaya Nagara. As Mackenzie walked between the fallen pillars, as he looked down on them from the hilltop nearby and drew his map, he was clearly struck by the grandeur and magnificence of these remains. And he must have wondered

7:25how such a great society could build all this, flourish, and then vanish into nothing. stuff, and then arsenic

7:41understood so we've a bee that brought to meet you or you or you know in listen together that is the new coming and and your or you have waited or you that was here that the

Podcast Introduction

8:01My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world?

8:33In this episode, I want to look at a civilization that has all but faded from memory in many parts of the world. That's the story of the Vijayanagara Empire of southern India. I want to tell the story of how this remarkable society rose up out of an age of conflict and fragmentation, how it built one of the largest and most impressive medieval cities in the world, and developed an identity that was both South Indian in nature and global in outlook.

9:08And finally, I want to tell the story of what happened to bring the great stone temples of Vijayanagara crashing down in fire and flame.

Hampi Landscape

9:24The granite terrain that surrounds the small village of Hampi and the ruins of Vijayanagara around it is one of the most distinct and easily recognizable in the world. It's a unique and surreal clutter of enormous rounded boulders, teetering in strange and unlikely balancing acts, looking a little like pebbles someone has piled up on a beach. A later visitor to the ruins,

10:02a British man named A. H. Longhurst, provides the following vivid description of the region's distinctive landscape. The site of the old city is a strangely wild place to have been the birthplace and capital of an empire. The whole of it is dotted with little, barren, rocky hills, and immediately north of it, the wide and rapid Tungabhadra River hurries along a boulder-strewn channel down rapids and through

10:33narrow gorges. The hills are of granite, weathered to every shade of color from grey to brown and have hardly any vegetation on them. The alternate burning days and chilly nights of the Deccan climate have seamed and split in every direction the huge masses of solid rock, and the earthquakes of remote ages have torn from their flanks the enormous boulders, and have piled these up round about their sides in the most

11:05fantastic confusion, or flung them headlong into the valleys below.

Geological History

11:13But despite its often precarious appearance, this landscape is actually one of the most ancient and stable surfaces to be found anywhere in the world. These vast sheet layers of granite were formed under the Earth's surface between about three and three and a half billion years ago, during the earliest formation of the Earth's crust. Some of these rocks were around during the emergence of the very first life on Earth

11:45from the tiniest microbes and bacteria. They have stood here and watched that life emerge from the seas, seen the dinosaurs rule the Earth only to be wiped out by a visitor from the stars, then seen the evolution of humans from small mammals. While softer rocks have eroded around them, these hard granites have remained. The landmass that they are a part of is often known as the Indian subcontinent, a place with one of the

12:17most interesting interplays of geology and climate in the world. This is a massive peninsula jutting out of the south of Asia that extends south for more than 3,000 kilometers from the Himalayan mountains. It's a landmass that encompasses an enormous variation in landscapes, from the mountainous cloud forests and coconut-palmed beaches in the south, to the snowy reaches of the Himalayas in the north, and the baking Tar Desert in the

12:50northwest. But generally, India is loosely divided into two regions, usually called North and South India. The north is a landscape of expansive, flat river lands, grassy plains stretching off into the distance, then rising to the foothills of the Himalayas. But in the south, the landscape is dominated by an arid, rocky shelf known as the Deccan

13:22plateau. The name Deccan comes from the same root as the Tamil word Tekhanam and the Sanskrit word Dakshina, which both mean the province of the south. This plateau is a sprawling table of rocky land that covers much of western, central, and southern India. It rises from low elevations in the north, up to more than 1,000 meters in the south, wedged between the two mountain

13:54ranges known as the western and eastern ghats. The word ghats is used in some South Indian languages to describe stone steps leading down to a river or lake, and so the word is also used for these mountains, since they look down over the coast. The western ghats are in fact the eroded remnants of what was once the edge of this continent. A hundred million years ago, India was joined

14:30to Africa before tearing away and beginning a journey of 6,000 kilometers across the ocean before colliding with Asia. Directly after the break from Africa, it's thought that the west coast of India would have appeared as a sheer cliff around 1,000 meters high. Over the next 100 million years, erosion and weathering would wear down this cliff into the dramatic series of mountains that today runs the whole length of the

15:05coast and can soar up to 2,600 meters. In the south, they are so massive that they block the clouds that roll in from the sea during India's southwest monsoon, meaning that the land on the west of the mountains is a vivid tropical green, a landscape of lagoons and mangrove forests, while the lands of the Deccan Plateau beyond them is relatively dry and arid. But across this rocky landscape, a number of great rivers do

15:41flow. They flow down the slope of the land eastwards, away from the mountains of the western ghats. Some of these Deccan rivers are the Godaveri, the Krishna, the Kaveri, and the Tungabhadra, and they all flow eastwards until they eventually empty into the Bay of Bengal on the eastern coast. And so, this is the landscape across which the great medieval drama of South India would unfold.

Ancient India

16:18The roots of human civilization in India are truly ancient. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that modern humans began arriving in the subcontinent between 75,000 to 50,000 years ago, migrating through the Middle East and Persia from our origins in eastern Africa. Cave paintings dating to around 10,000 years ago have been found in the rock shelters of Bimbetka in central India. These paintings show men riding

16:55horses and even elephants, suggesting that the story of humans in this region has been intertwined with those of animals since the very beginning. Around the year 6,500 BC, agriculture emerged as people began to farm winter grasses, barley, and wheat in Balochistan in modern Pakistan, on the banks of the Indus River. From about the year 3000 BC, large cities began to form in this region, which today are known by the names

17:38Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and which are estimated to have held as many as 60,000 people. The cities of the civilization that grew up in the Indus Valley were built from baked bricks and featured elaborate drainage systems and water supply systems, along with what may have been temples and workshops. Its people used a system of standardized weights to measure out goods, and in some cities, large canals and docks have also been uncovered.

18:13There's evidence that the Indus Valley may have traded by sea with the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians and Akkadians, and Indus Valley artifacts have been found as far afield as Oman, Bahrain, and in the south of Iraq. And it's perhaps here that the people of India first truly harnessed the immense power of the elephant. The carved seals of the Indus Valley seemed to provide the earliest evidence of the organized

18:46capturing and training of elephants from as early as 6000 BC. By the time the first surviving texts were written in India many thousands of years later, tamed elephants would have already been a common everyday site, carrying heavy loads for construction, transporting important people, and fighting as weapons of war.

19:14The Indus Valley civilization is also thought to have experimented with writing, although the extent to which they did so is a matter for debate. Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of distinct symbols that Indus people used on stamp seals or small tablets, ceramic pots, and what may have been signs hanging over the gates of their inner citadel. Most of these inscriptions are tiny, containing only four to five characters. The longest ever found on a single surface is only 17 characters long, and we can't tell

19:52whether this was truly a written language. If the Indus Valley symbols really are a form of writing, the tragedy is that it has never been decoded. And so, the names of their cities, the names of their kings, their deeds, and works, the lives of everyday people, all of it has been lost beneath the sands of Pakistan, perhaps forever. All that we have left are the names that later people gave to the remains of

20:25these haunting places. One of their largest cities is known today as Mohenjo-daro, which, in the language of Sindhi, simply means the mound of dead men. While it's not clear what happened to cause the downfall of their society, we do have some idea. The Indus Valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BC, linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time, an event that may have also

20:59contributed to the collapse of Sumerian society in the valley of Mesopotamia. The Indus Valley did not use as extensive irrigation techniques, and so were more reliant on the annual floods of the river. As the floods failed, the capacity of the river to support the population would have collapsed. At this time, a people known as the Arya are thought to have arrived in the valley. It's unclear whether these Aryans came as settlers or refugees, whether they were welcomed or met with conflict, whether

21:36they brought new technologies and language into the valley, or whether they simply learned them there. But whatever the case, this pattern would be repeated countless times over the coming history. People would arrive in India from the lands beyond, mix with the people already there, and a new culture would be born, a blend of old and new, foreign and homegrown.

22:06By the year 1300 BC, the people of the Indus Valley had left their drought-ridden land and migrated eastwards, leaving the cities of Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and many others to crumble into the sands. They migrated east until they reached a large, bountiful river, which meandered across an enormous floodplain, rich and full of life. And here, on the banks of this river, the next phase of Indian history

22:37would begin. Although the story of Vijayanagara takes place in the southern realm of the Deccan's arid and rocky plateau, it begins here in the north, in this flat and rich river plain, and the river that flows across it is known as the River Ganges. This river is known locally as the Ganga, and sometimes Ma Ganga, or Mother River. It begins in an icy cave

23:17known as Gomuk, or the mouth of the cow, which yawns open at the bottom of the great glacier Gangotri, high up in the Himalayas. Since its formation 50 million years ago, the enormous weight of the Himalayan mountain chain has quite literally weighed down the land around it. To the south, the ground has been pressed down, so it is now almost at sea level. And it's across this flat plain that the Ganges flows for more than two and a half thousand kilometers, from east to west,

23:52down to the hot mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal, where it finally empties its silty waters into the sea. For millennia, this great waterway has sustained around a tenth of the world's population with food, water, and fish, and has provided a highway for people and trade to pass up and down the river. And on one of the main tributaries of the Ganges, a smaller river known as the Yamuna,

24:24sits the city of Delhi.

City of Delhi

24:37Delhi is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has been continually inhabited for more than 8,000 years. The soil on the banks of the Yamuna is rich, and so the people here have always flourished. It's in this region of northwestern India, during the period following the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization, that the earliest examples of written texts were laid down in the ancient northern language of Sanskrit. These texts began to be written around three and a half thousand years ago,

25:12and they are known as the Vedas.

25:17Unfortunately for us, many of these early texts were written on fragile, perishable substances, many of them on paper made of the bark of the Himalayan birch tree, using inks made of ash. Some of these texts, remarkably, have survived from as far back as the third or fourth centuries, but in most cases, they have been lost. The oldest of these Sanskrit texts, known as the Rig Veda, was probably transmitted orally from at least the second millennium BC, or more than 4,000 years ago.

25:54In it is contained a poetic vision of how written language developed in this region. When, in giving names, they first set forth the beginning of language, their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love. When the wise ones formed language with their mind,

26:28purifying it, like grain with a winnowing fan. Then friends knew friendships, an auspicious mark placed on their language. The publication of these texts had an enormous impact. For about a thousand years after 300 BC, the language of Sanskrit, once spoken only in the north of India,

27:01would spread to eclipse all others, becoming the common language of art, science, religion, and poetry, much as Latin once was in Europe. It was in this period that the Vedic religion formed, based on the script of the Vedas. From this, after a number of adaptations and evolutions, would emerge the religion we know today as Hinduism.

27:32Today, the lands of India are united in a single modern nation, but it's perhaps one of the most diverse nation-states on earth, and certainly the largest nation to comprise so many different cultures within its borders. The citizens of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and all the 28 states of modern India are as different from one another as the citizens of France, Germany, and Italy. They vary in their traditional dress, diet, ritual observances, and in the 22 official major languages

28:09spoken across the subcontinent. South of Maharashtra in central India, the languages belong to the Dravidian family, a body of languages found only in India. While Maharashtra's Marathi language, and all the major languages of the north, including the ancient tongue of Sanskrit, belong to the Indo-European family, of which English is also a member. But perhaps the most marked differences from region to region are in the realm of religion.

28:44Today, the word Hinduism is applied clumsily to a whole variety of different religious traditions that originate in India, and that take the ancient texts of the Vedas as their starting point. Many Hindus refer to their religion as Sanatana Dharma, the eternal way or the eternal duty. But Indian religion was never united under a central authority, and so it gives rise to a great deal of variation. In very simple terms, Hindus generally believe in one god, named Brahman,

29:21who is refracted into many different aspects, the way a beam of light refracted through a glass prism can be shown to contain many colors. The ancient text, the Maitri Upanishad, explains this refracted conception of god, in which each living being also contains a spark of this original supreme power. Now the part of him which belongs to darkness, that is called Rudra,

30:02that part of him which belongs to obscurity, that is called Brahma, that part of him which belongs to goodness, that is called Vishnu, he being one, becomes three, becomes eight, becomes eleven, becomes twelve, becomes infinite. Because he thus came to be, he is the being, he moves about, having entered all beings, he has become the lord of all beings.

30:33That is the soul within and without, yes, within and without.

30:41Although this one god can manifest in many different ways, generally, most Hindus predominantly worship one of two different manifestations. These are Shiva and Vishnu. In traditional Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of the world,

31:12the universe is created by God, who acts to preserve all that is good within it. He is opposed by Satan or Shaitan, who acts to destroy and corrupt. But Hindu conceptions of the universe are a little different. In Hinduism, Shiva is both the creator and the destroyer, a beautiful and fearsome god who represents the primal energy of the universe. Shiva is often depicted as a dancer, reflecting the dance of the universe

31:45as it passes from creation to destruction, as the flowers bloom, blossom, wither, and then die, as people pass from childhood to adulthood, to old age, and then to death, all of it part of the same cycle, the same dance that goes on and on into eternity. To imagine this way of thinking, we might consider that creation and destruction are often not opposed, but are part of the same process. A beautiful mushroom might spring out of the decay of a fallen tree.

32:19The death of a gazelle gives life to the cheetah, and the fall of one civilization can give rise to another. But the god Vishnu, on the other hand, is the preserver. As Shiva's dance of creation and destruction rolls on, Vishnu is the one who holds things together, if only for a time. Whenever the need arises, he appears on earth in human form, as great mythical heroes like Rama and Krishna,

32:50as this stanza in the Bhagavad Gita shows.

33:02Whenever righteousness wanes and unrighteousness increases, I send myself forth for the protection of the good and for the destruction of evil, and for the establishment of righteousness. I come into being age after age. So, these are some important points to remember going forward.

33:38That India at this time was home to a great variety of different sects, orders, and religious traditions. That today we might group together under the label Hinduism, but that the people of the time would have considered to be considerably different, and between which there often existed great hostility. And as the people of India had increasing contact with the people of the wider world, in the second half of the first millennium AD, a new religion would enter the diverse mix of Indian belief.

34:12That is, the religion of Islam. This new religion would bring both conquest and culture. It would form a cultural rift that would split the Indian subcontinent in two, but that would also connect it to the great capitals of the wider world, and bring a new age of technology and advancement. Its influence would bring about a time of paradoxes, contrasts, and ironies.

34:47And chief among these is that it was the arrival of Islam that would lead to the building of perhaps the greatest Hindu empire to ever arise on the Indian peninsula, the Empire of Vijayanagara. The history of Islam in India is long and complex.

Islam in India

35:12According to traditional claims, the world's youngest major religion arrived on the shores of the subcontinent during the life of the Prophet Muhammad, brought by traders who arrived by sea from the Persian Gulf. And at first, this young religion must have felt very alien to the people of India. While Hindus did not eat beef as a result of religious reverence of the cow, Muslims quite happily ate it, but were forbidden from eating pork.

35:45Hindus generally believed that God appears in multiple different forms, while Muslims believed emphatically in one indivisible God. While Hindus believed that you could access God by giving offerings to statues and idols, Muslims rejected any depiction of God in sculpture or painting. But while Islam arrived through trade in the south, its arrival in the north of India would be a much less peaceful affair.

36:15In the past, the Indian subcontinent has often been depicted by historians as a kind of geographical fortress, sealed off on every side by the mountains and the sea. But when we look at the history of the region, the true picture is one of constant movements of people in and out of its landmass,

36:46bringing with them their cultures, cuisines, architectural styles, and beliefs.

36:54In fact, India was not a fortress at all. The sea that appears to hem the continent in on either side was actually a busy highway, connecting India to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea on one side, and Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and China on the other, meaning that the port cities of India were always diverse and booming centers of trade. This meant that Indian pepper and cinnamon even flavored the meals eaten by Roman senators,

37:25and an Indian bronze figure of the Buddha has been found in a 9th century Viking grave on the small Swedish island of Helgo. In the northwest of India, the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan were a formidable boundary, but a number of routes like the Khyber Pass and Bolan Pass cut through their rugged cliffs in the region of the Indus River Valley, and these passes were home to just as lively a traffic as the seas. These roads were so well established

37:56that Alexander the Great was able to march his large army into the region of the Punjab in the 4th century BC, and he would be followed by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius, and many other would-be conquerors down the ages.

38:14While the Himalayas were the most impenetrable boundary of all, that didn't stop Indian Buddhism from spreading across them into Tibet and on to the rest of Southeast Asia, reaching as far north as Japan.

38:30In the first millennium AD, powerful Hindu empires like the Pallavas, the Pandyas, and the Cholas grew up in India and spread their influence right across the continent so that Hindu gods can be found carved into temples as far afield as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and the language of Sanskrit would become the language of learning and religion right across the Asian landmass. But while these highways generated enormous opportunities

39:01in connecting India to the world outside, they also contained great dangers. Powerful enemies lived in the lands beyond the mountains. Some of these enemies were nomadic, armies of horsemen from the wild steppes of Central Asia that could reach truly astonishing sizes. These would periodically sweep down through the Khyber Pass to raid and pillage, before disappearing back into the wilds.

39:32But other peoples came to conquer.

39:41Within 20 years of the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim armies had achieved one of the most spectacular feats of military campaigning that has ever been seen in world history. Once a small and relatively insignificant regional power, the Arabic-speaking peoples had emerged onto the world stage and immediately knocked out two ancient heavyweights, the Byzantine and Sassanid empires. They then followed the same course eastward as Alexander the Great,

40:15toppling empire after empire until the Arab domains stretched across three continents, with borders touching China, Europe, and India. To the Muslims of the time, this was clear proof of the divine nature of their Prophet's revelations. But just as Alexander had found out nearly a millennium before, spectacular conquests don't simply transform overnight into a stable empire.

40:45Just like Alexander's empire, the newly conquered Arab territories burst like a bubble and quickly broke off into separate Muslim kingdoms stretching across the Middle East and Central Asia. These were ruled over by sultans, a word derived from the Arabic word sultā or power, literally meaning the one who has power. These new Muslim kingdoms now sat on the other side of the Indus River,

41:16and for the next 300 years, they would not make any move to advance into India. The Hindu kings who ruled North India would eye them with suspicion, but it seems they didn't think of them any differently to any of the other peoples who had come and gone in these regions. They referred to them sometimes as Turks or Turushkas, sometimes as Tajiks, other times slightly confusedly as Greeks, but more usually with the word Mlecha,

41:47a word that means something like barbarian. To these Muslim kingdoms, the wealthy lands of the Ganges Plain would have looked like an irresistible target.

42:01At this time in history, India likely had the most sophisticated economy in the world, and unlike Alexander the Great, the Muslim sultans knew just how large and wealthy India was. From the year 1000 on, increasingly aggressive raids began to take place, often originating from warrior kingdoms in the region of Afghanistan. These horsemen would ride south down the Bolan Pass

42:31and raid the lands of India. But towards the end of the 12th century, a new and more ambitious group would arrive in the region, and they would come to stay. These were a group of Turkic peoples known as the Khurids.

The Khurids

42:58The Khurids were a dynasty of Iranian origin, but who currently ruled over the Khur region of present-day Afghanistan. They had long raided the northern lands of India, riding down from the hills and burning cities, taking away loot. But in recent years, they had come under Persian influence and converted to Islam. And now, one Khurid ruler set his sights on greater riches than what could be looted and strapped to a horse.

43:30He was a man known today as Muhammad Khurid.

43:39Muhammad Khurid was born in the year 1149 in the mountainous region of Khur. Khur had been primarily populated by Buddhists for the last thousand years, but from the 11th century on, it became increasingly Muslim and would soon become a center of learning, home to Muslim teachers and scholars. Muhammad Khurid was a warlord, and he wanted not just to loot and rob North India like his ancestors,

44:10but to conquer territory for himself and settle down there for good. When the annual monsoon ended in northern India, Muhammad Khurid swept down the Khyber Pass. With an army powered by strong Afghan horses and bolstered with a large contingent of slave soldiers, he quickly seized territory in the Punjab, a lush green land at the foot of the Himalayas. The chronicler Fereshtar, a Persian scholar who settled in India

44:42in the 16th century, recounts this campaign in sparse terms. In the year following, Muhammad Khuri, having recruited his forces, marched towards Peshawar, which in a short time was brought under subjection. Muhammad Khuri now returned to Ghazni, but in the next year, marched towards Debal in the province of Sindh and overran the whole country as far as the sea coast,

45:14returning laden with rich spoil. In the borderlands of the Punjab, Muhammad Khuri created a Sunni Islamic kingdom of his own, which extended east of the Indus River, and he began to expand it. He tasked his generals with taking more territory, and in the year 1193, one of these generals, a military slave, captured the small regional capital of Delhi.

45:45After the return of Muhammad Khuri, his general took the fort of Meret and the city of Delhi, and it is owing to this circumstance that foreign nations say the empire of Delhi was founded by a slave, and making Delhi the seat of his government, established himself there, and compelled all the districts around to acknowledge the faith of Islam.

46:12In doing so, Muhammad Khuri laid the foundation for the Muslim kingdom that for the next 300 years would rule over a large part of India and establish Muslim culture there for good. This was the power that became known as the Sultanate of Delhi.

Sultanate of Delhi

46:36We know surprisingly little about what life was like for the everyday people of India, many of them Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist, while living under Islamic rule.

46:51People's experiences must have differed greatly across time and from person to person. While many Hindus no doubt greatly resented their new Muslim rulers, others simply got on with their lives, and others still would have seen great opportunity in the new arrangement, with many even converting. The sources are surprisingly thin on any kind of religious conflict between the Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects.

47:22Certainly, some Hindu temples were demolished or turned into mosques, although many were left standing. Muslim rulers were often contemptuous towards the Hindu religion, condemning what they thought of as the worship of idols, but Hindu worship was never banned. For the most part, Muslim rulers were clearly pragmatic and had no desire to unnecessarily aggravate their new subjects. Pockets of resistance seem to have been most fierce

47:53among tribal peoples living in remote areas, but in the cities, there is little evidence of uprisings. While the Muslim sultans certainly portrayed their conquests as religious missions in their propaganda, it's not clear that religion was always at the forefront of their minds. Much more pressing was the everyday matters of power and prestige that occupy the thoughts of most rulers. Historical sources contain much more information about the ceaseless conflicts

48:25that took place between Muslim rulers and other Muslims than any conflict with their own Hindu citizens. The resistance that did occur, often among tribal people, could still be fierce. In the year 1206, Muhammad Huri, the conqueror of North India, was campaigning in the mountainous region of Sindh, crushing a rebellion by the Punjabi hill tribe

48:56known as the Gukurs. One night, with exceptional stealth, a small group of Gukur warriors snuck into his camp and dealt their revenge. As the chronicler Farishtar recalls, On the 2nd of Shaban, having reached the village of Rotuk, on the banks of the Indus, 20 Gukurs, who had lost some of their relations in the late wars, entered into a conspiracy against the king's life.

49:26They found their way up to the tents in the night. One of them advanced to the tent door, but being stopped by a sentry who was about to seize him, he plunged his dagger into his breast. The other assassins took the opportunity of cutting their way into the king's tent. He was asleep, with two slaves fanning him. These stood, petrified with terror, when they beheld the Gukurs enter, who, without hesitation, sheathed their daggers

49:57in the king's body, which was afterwards found to have been pierced by no fewer than 22 wounds. Thus fell Sultan Muhammad Huri, after a reign of 32 years.

50:11And from there, the Muslims' fortunes would only get worse.

50:19That same year, far away in the steppes of Mongolia, a vast federation of nomadic peoples would unite together and crown Genghis Khan as the emperor of all the steppe people of Mongolia. Genghis Khan would soon unleash an invasion of China, where anywhere between 10 to 40 million people may have been killed. From there, he would march through Persia and the Middle East, tearing the heart

50:49out of the Muslim world and burning its intellectual capitals like Baghdad to the ground. In just a few decades, around 10% of the world's population is thought to have been killed. Muslim Turks from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Persia, and beyond would flee the advance of the Khan's horde in enormous numbers, and many of them would come to settle in the newly Muslim kingdoms of North India. While they had come

51:22as conquerors, Muslims would soon be arriving in great numbers as desperate refugees.

51:29After the death of Muhammad Khuri, the next hundred years saw a succession of weak rulers, tyrants, and constant assassinations, as well as repeated attempts by the armies of the great Khans of Mongolia to conquer northern India. But, time and again, the horse-powered armies of the sultanate were able to turn them back, sometimes inflicting massive defeats on Mongol armies.

51:59It's one of the great ironies of Muslim rule in India that the sultans of Delhi, who themselves had arrived as conquerors, were perhaps the only thing that stopped the armies of the Khans from riding south across India and committing the kinds of atrocities that they inflicted on the helpless civilian population of China. The sultans were able to hold off the Mongol attacks, and with their armies well-trained and now exceptionally

52:30experienced, they even strengthened their hold on north India. One by one, they swept away the fragmented Hindu kingdoms that ruled there, and as the Mongol threat gradually diminished in the north, they extended their borders even further to the south.

52:49Under the Khilji dynasty, whose armies were led by a eunuch slave general named Malik Kafur, the armies of the sultanate crossed the Vindia mountains, the traditional boundary between north and south India, conquered lands there, and forced the kingdoms beyond to pay tribute. By the year 1300, the Delhi sultanate had established a lasting power that stretched from the Indus valley to the bay of Bengal, from the foothills of the Himalayas

53:20to the gateway to the arid plateau of the Deccan. This power was Sunni Islamic, culturally a blend of Turkic and Persian, and in its more stable moments, its rulers dreamed of expanding ever further into the south, and eventually raising their banner over the entire subcontinent.

Muhammad bin Tughlaq

53:41These dreams would finally be realized by perhaps the most complex and controversial figure to ever rule over India, a man named Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

54:00Muhammad bin Tughlaq came to the throne of the Delhi sultanate in the year 1325 at the age of 35. In this year around the world, the greatest king of the West African kingdom of Mali, Mansa Musa, completed his pilgrimage to Mecca, giving out so much gold on the way that he crashed the economies of the Middle East. In the Valley of Mexico, a bedraggled band of travelers settled down on an island in the

54:30middle of a lake, and founded what would become the great city of Tenochtitlan. In the court of Delhi, a new sultan was crowned amid rumors of treachery, murder, and betrayal.

Tughlaq's Reign

54:48Muhammad bin Tughlaq was an enigmatic and mercurial ruler. On one hand, he was an intellectual, an expert in the Quran and Islamic law, who could speak Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Sanskrit, as well as a famous lover of poetry. Like all the sultans of Delhi, he was a Muslim, but was mostly tolerant of other religions, and was the only sultan recorded to have taken part in his people's

55:18Hindu festivals. But he also had a much darker side.

55:25Muhammad bin Tughlaq's father had come from humble origins. the son of a slave and a Hindu mother, but he had risen to power and founded the Tughlaq dynasty. But then, only five years into his reign, a freak accident occurred. The sultan was sitting under a pavilion with his favorite son and the intended crown prince, when, without warning, the structure collapsed, crushing them both to

55:56death. In some sources, the event is attributed to a bolt of lightning striking the pavilion. One scholar of the time named Barani describes the event in the following terms. A thunderbolt from the sky descended upon the earth, and the roof under which the sultan was seated fell down, crushing him and five or six other persons so that they died.

56:26But the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who visited the Delhi Sultanate during this time, and wrote his account once he was safely back in his home city of Fez, gives a different version of the story. He claims that the pavilion collapse was planned, an assassination orchestrated by the king's younger son, who would go on to take the throne, Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The scheme was that

56:56whenever the elephants would tread on one side of it, the whole building would fall in ruins. The sultan alighted, and his son asked his permission to parade the elephants before him. And the elephants were led up from one direction as was planned, and when they walked on that side, the pavilion fell in on the sultan and his son, Mahmud. Muhammad bin Tughlaq gave orders to fetch axes and mattocks in order to dig for them, but he made a sign to delay, and in consequence they were not brought out until

57:27after sunset. They cleared away the ruins and found the sultan dead with his back bent over his son to protect him.

57:39As with many rulers who came to power through treachery, Muhammad bin Tughlaq would spend his reign in